Eh, the fences are nice and I love Lexington, but I would credit the fences mostly to the legacy of slavery. Lots of places have limestone. Those fences didn't build themselves. It's great that people nowadays are conserving them, but I haven't seen many new fences down there.
This is actually a huge misconception and false. The majority of fences were built by immigrant Irish stonemasons, although it is obvious that slave labor probably played some role in this. The style of stone fence was directly imported from Ulster & Northern Ireland, with Irish immigrants. If you'd like to know more about the history of the fences, and more specifically, the masons that built them, the authoritative source is "Rock Fences of Kentucky" [0].
That's not to say that slavery does not play a role in the history of the area (and the entire country), but much of the heritage of the stone fences has little to do with slavery or slave labor. Post emancipation, the number of freedmen stonemasons slowly grew and displaced Irish stonemasons.
That's a great link; thanks! I've heard the slave explanation from numerous people at various stud farms, but not everything we hear is true...
Still, southern Missouri has lots of limestone (it's "the cave state"), and had lots of Irish and Scottish immigrants, and I can think of precisely one "slave fence" in the whole state. If the difference wasn't limestone, and it wasn't Irishmen, maybe it was that Kentucky had lots of rich tobacco plantation owners, and Missouri didn't.
